Ok. I’m through with nursing blog entries for months before I kick them out of the drafts folder. Most of them never make it out, and no one is fooled by my back-dating.

We’re leaving for Washington Wednesday morning to stay for a week. Chances are pretty decent that we’ll buy a house in Olympia while we are there. Then we will move up there in September.

The reasons we are moving away from Whittier are complex, but half a dozen conversational paths lead to the same conclusion: that it makes sense at this time in our lives. With my work and our homeschooling, we’re more portable than we’ve ever been. We could never afford to own a home in Whittier. Renting something that meets our family-of-five-homeschooling-with-a-home-office needs is looking quite expensive. We’ve never had the advantage of living near either of the kids’ sets of grandparents, and we’d like to do that. And a dozen other similar realizations.

But if we weren’t supposed to leave, none of those things would be very compelling. Indeed, they were all true a few months ago, but we weren’t thinking of moving then. We had decided that God had arranged that the next phase of our life would be working through the remodel of the property that I got/bought/was blessed with a couple of years ago, and that once that was done, and we’d lived there a while, we’d likely move out of state. We recently discovered, right after solidifying that understanding with each other, that the costs for the remodel/addition were 60-80% higher than we’d been led to believe, and that continuing with those plans was impossible. So then we had to decide whether we were supposed to stay put in the nice, expensive (although low-priced for the area) rental we were in, continuing to enjoy and participate in the incredible community we live in while struggling to make ends meet as a single-income family, or whether there was a reason why we shouldn’t take the plans we had for the future and make them happen now.

When we thought about it, it seemed like all the reasons why we shouldn’t move would always exist, but that there were opportunities to be seized in the present that wouldn’t exist if we waited. The grandparents are still young, but one of these days H’s dad isn’t going to be going out hunting or doing welding projects for the boys like he does now. We’d like to have the space for a garden and some animals while our boys are still learning what the world is for (taking care of and marvelling at). My business is just getting off the ground, and it might as well get off the ground somewhere else, before I get too entrenched to move easily. Property prices are getting soft in southern California, while they are still rising in Washington. I’ve always wanted to build a house using green materials, and while I’m not amphibian enough to want to build an underground house west of the Cascades, I’m a lot more likely to be able to find a place and the resources to build with haybales or Rastra in the Olympia area sometime in the next few years. My boys aren’t 11 and 13, they are almost 5 and 7. And I’m not 25, I’m 35, semi-sedentary, and plenty gray.

So we feel that God has aligned a lot of things for us all of a sudden, and while it’s still sort of shocking for me to think about, it’s going to happen, and I’ll adapt as it does. I’ll likely need to pick up some new clients up there, but I’ll still be working with many of my existing clients and probably flying down to Los Angeles a couple times a month to take care of some larger on-site projects. We’re not going to try and buy a place on a lot of land outside town like you might imagine. We value people and know that living centrally is the best way to stay in relationship, so we’re looking at homes relatively near the city center at this point.

And Olympia is a really cool town. H lived there for 3-4 years before we got married, and during our long-distance dating relationship, I found myself flying up there almost monthly for a while. It’s the state capital, obviously, and has a college and two junior colleges. Good infrastructure, significant counter-culture, lots of federal employees, very green, and right off the Pugent Sound. 18 hours up the 5 freeway from Los Angeles.

That’s enough for now. I’ll keep you more posted than I have.